Alumni News

List of 3 news stories.

• Alumni Arts Showcase

  4/21/2025
  Emma Johnson
  On March 1st, alumni, past faculty, current students, teachers, and parents gathered for the first ever Alumni Arts Showcase.

  
  

  The setting of Community Hall was fitting for this meeting of past, present, and future. The space has long been the center of performance at Tandem. It’s the place where we gather for Morning Meeting, Meeting for Worship, open mics, concerts, and plays. The Community Hall is also getting a well-deserved revamp. In true Tandem fashion, the project began with a student. Current senior Sawyer Ruday reached out to Peter Gaines (Director of Major Giving) to learn about philanthropy to raise money to improve the Community Hall. So far, we have raised nearly $110,000 toward an overall goal of $150,000! Thanks to this initiative, that night the stage was lit with new, state of the art, environmentally friendly, LED theater lights!

  
  

  Between songs and poems, performers shared stories and memories about their experiences at Tandem and how this place has shaped them. Ephraim Firdyiwek ‘04 shared an acoustic set of originals and covers. Angus Murdoch ‘86 jammed alongside his son, current TFS junior, Will. (Will can often be found playing his cello on the back porch of the main building or a bench around campus).

  
  

  Members of the cast of Mamma Mia!, this year’s spring musical, had us singing along to ABBA’s “Dancing Queen.” Middle school theater teacher Edwina Herring is comfortable on the stage. It’s her classroom after all, but Edwina brought her customary openness to the Alumni Arts Showcase, sharing a series of poems and an acapella rendition of “The Greatest Love of All.”

  
  

  Emma Johnson ‘19 read from her college thesis, a long poem titled “Litterfoot.” Jay Pun ‘99 introduced us to a new instrument, the phin, a traditional lute from Thailand, and told us tales of his musical education at Tandem in the 90s. 

  
  

  In a testament to the powerful and enduring relationships forged between students and teachers at Tandem,  Miller Oberman ‘97 and Charlotte Matthews (past faculty) gave a reading “in tandem.” They shared moving tributes about what they had taught one another about writing, learning, and life. Miller read from his poetry collection Impossible Things, and Charlotte read from her latest collection of essays Everything in its Brilliance. 

  
  

  Thank you to all who came to share their voices and talents and to all who came to listen and be together again. If you’re interested in learning more and getting involved, you can find out more about the Community Hall Campaign by clicking here or reaching out to Peter Gaines (pgaines@tandemfs.org).

• The Long View: The Rise of Tandem XC Issue 1

  4/21/2025
  Emma Johnson
  The Long View: The Rise of Tandem XC
  
  

  You may not think of Tandem, our alma mater, as an athletic powerhouse. Yet for a school of our size, we’ve had some incredible triumphs in sports. Back in the early 2010s, girls soccer was the dominant program at Tandem. They were on a 3-year state championship winning streak. Yet, with a small pool of students there’s always an ebb and flow, a rise and fall. When one program is big and popular, it draws students away from others. The dominant program today, whether you believe it or not, is cross country.
  
  

  This all started with history teacher, Jason Farr, and former head of school, Andy Jones-Wilkins. 

  Jason and Andy were both competitive ultrarunners and they started going on runs together. Andy remembers, “We would spend time just kind of running and talking about stuff.” One of the things they talked about was a vision for what cross country could be at Tandem.
  
  

  Jason remembers, “We both agreed that, of all the sports, cross country was a perfect Tandem sport.” He says, “At most schools the cross country kids are kind of quirky and good students and that’s like most Tandem kids: quirky, good students, and willing to work hard.”
  
  

  Running also embodies the Quaker tenet of Simplicity. Andy believed that the program could work and grow without a lot of tending. The thought was, Andy says, “to develop an anchor program with a sport where it didn’t matter if you had a lot of kids or a few kids. You didn’t need a lot of equipment. You didn’t need a fancy facility. You didn’t need a whole lot of skills. You didn’t need to have grown up coming through a pipeline of youth soccer or basketball or anything else.”
  
  

  On a hot summer day in 2013, Andy called Jason to his office in the Main Building. He wanted to ask Jason if he’d like to be the new cross country coach after Joe Doherty, (MS Math/Science teacher), the current coach, was leaving.
  
  

  Jason says, remembering that day in Andy’s office, “I was very brazen and confident and I said ‘Give me ten years, I can win a state championship.’ Andy kind of laughed at that and said, ‘I LOVE IT!’”
  
  

  Maybe it was the heat or Andy’s exuberance, but Jason had some experience to back him up. Though he grew up in Tennessee playing football and didn’t get into running until college, Jason later worked under a great high school cross country coach in Asheville, North Carolina, Steve Carpenter. Jason says, “I learned a lot when I was in Asheville. That was one reason I had so much confidence.” Steve shared with Jason, but he also knew what an opportunity it was so Jason says he “watched and observed and absorbed everything I could.” 

  What Jason saw is that Steve’s system worked. “He took kids through a lot of psychological work, and just got a lot out of them.” In Asheville, Jason learned that developing a great team is less about perfecting strategy and more about building a culture. He calls this “one of the secrets of coaching running.” That really it all comes down to, as Jason says, “getting kids to believe that they can do hard things.”
  
  

  Ultimately, getting kids to believe they can do hard things isn’t about physical training or even sports necessarily. It’s mental. In truth, so much of running is. Jason admits “Not every coach can do that and I don’t do it with every kid, but I think we’ve built a culture where now the kids help each other.”
  
  

  How did they get there? How do you build a culture?
  
  

  Part 1: The Early Days
  
  

  In the early days of Jason’s tenure as cross country coach, the focus was on getting kids to join the team and making running fun. Tandem XC was full of fun. For as much as running can be mentally and physically grueling, the team made up for it with ample amounts of silliness.
  
  

  Noah Tinsley ’18 shares, “I think the team had a really cool vibe. It’s a cool sport because it really combines team effort and individuals trying to do their thing.” Noah also remembers one race, “There was this puddle and I remember going and laying in the puddle” after the race. “Felt really good,” he says.
  
  

  I began running cross country with Andy when I was in 6th grade. In 8th grade, I joined the Varsity squad and being a part of this team had a huge impact on my Tandem experience. There was no shame in cross country. We talked about it all, all the gross, nasty, weird parts of pushing your body to the limits of what it could do.

  Another muddy memory comes from Pearl Outlaw ’15: “I went on a summer run and it ended up being super rainy and muddy and basically we just embraced it. We were running in the rain, and we were covered in mud, and we jumped in the lake over at the development. We took this photo when we got back and we’re just all smiling, covered in mud.”
  
  

  

  Tandem XC May, 2014
  
  

  I think this image captures what cross country was in those days. Not pretty or perfect, but fun, everyone embracing the messiness and getting down in the mud.
  
  

  Pearl remembers the toughness, grit, and wildness of the team in the first few years with Jason coaching. Alec Simon ‘16 “forgot his shoes one day and we were running hill sprints, and so he ran hill sprints in bare feet. His feet were black and blue and grass stained. We would do anything for Jason. We were like ‘Okay, Jason, whatever you say!’”
  
  

  Perhaps it sounds a bit cultish, buying into the extreme, and willing to do anything for your “guru.” But it was also a safe and warm place, where everyone’s individual goals were just as important as any collective mission.
  
  

  Pearl Outlaw is one of the great Tandem XC legends. She represents what the team was, and is, at its core, as well as how being a part of something special can change your life.
  
  

  Growing up, Pearl says that sports “didn’t feel super comfortable for me. They were very intimidating.” But she knew she wanted to continue participating in athletics and “cross country just seemed the most welcoming and comfortable.”
  
  

  Pearl remembers, “I didn’t see myself as a runner at all before that.” Being a part of the cross country team was different than any other sport she had tried. “I remember immediately feeling so comfortable and just not judged.”
  
  

  This is the consistent message I heard, and what I remember from being a part of the team myself. In many ways it’s part of what makes Tandem special, its unique, good energy. But that special Tandem feeling became concentrated, for many, on the cross country team.
  
  

  Pearl says, “While I was running, my vision was changing, too. Now, I’m nearly completely blind, but back then I could still run, and I would pretty much just follow whoever was in front of me.” She remembers one race her senior year, the meet before states, where the course was mostly through open grass fields. As it was getting dark “I started to realize like ‘oh, my gosh I can’t see where I’m going.’ And I don’t know what people around me were thinking because I kept saying that to the spectators, and I think they were just confused. But no one was doing anything. I was like ‘I can’t see!’ Literally I can’t see the trail.’”
  
  

  A little further along the course she found Jason and the boys’ team, on a cool down run after their race and then she found Emma Passino ‘17. Emma and Pearl grabbed each other and they “held hands basically for the rest of the race and ran together because I had lost my way,” Pearl says with a sarcastic chuckle.
  
  

  If you asked Jason, he would say this is what Tandem XC is all about. Not a state title, but moments like these, when people come together to support one another. At the end of every season, Jason holds a party to celebrate and acknowledge that year’s group of runners. It’s an important part of the culture, celebrating milestones, accomplishments, and setting goals for the future.
  
  

  Before we ever won any titles, he created awards to honor the values of the team: courage, tenacity, kindness. He named an award after Pearl, called the ‘Pearl Outlaw Courage Award.’ It’s a high honor in the name of an incredible and inspiring athlete.
  
  Pearl Outlaw, September 2014
  
  

  For Pearl, who now competes as a professional rower, Jason’s ability to recognize and lift up every runner is an essential component of a great team. She says, “any team that I’ve been on, the best ones are where no matter if you’re the fastest on the team or the back of the pack, you still feel like the coach believes in you and is invested in you. I think Jason was really able to do that,” says Pearl. “You just felt like he cared about every single person on the team and how they did, no matter where they were in their running.”
  
  

  Even though Pearl has reached incredible heights in her athletic career, rowing for the United States in three world championships, she’s still finding new ways to challenge herself. This year she switched from flatwater rowing, in rivers and streams, to coastal rowing, off beaches and in the ocean. Pearl says, “I just did my first world championship with them in September and we were the first para-team basically in the sport that had competed at world championships.”
  
  

  Her running days came back in use in coastal rowing. One of the events involves sprinting down the beach into the water and jumping into the boat. One day, Pearl says “we were practicing that, and I did my first sprint into the water, and I think I face planted in a wave or something, but from that moment on I was like ‘this is awesome! This is amazing!’”
  
  

  It’s that attitude, getting knocked down by a wave and thinking ‘I can’t wait to do that again,’ that Jason hopes to cultivate as an essential, courageous, and joyful part of the cross country team.

  Reminiscing about the old days running cross country, Pearl is smiling. She remembers “I think it was cross country first” where “I started seeing myself as an athlete...and feeling like even with my eyesight I could really do anything.”
  
  

  The one bad memory, Pearl says, is of the cross country page of the yearbook from her senior year which only had photos of the boys running; none of the girls were represented. I went back and looked. The title reads “Varsity Cross Country” and we see Jason and the boys, but none of the girls on the team.
  

   

  

  TFS Yearbook 2016

  This oversight marks an issue that the cross country team has faced for some time and is still working through. It’s been one of the only co-ed sports at Tandem, and boys and girls practicing together has been one of the things that makes the team unique and special. But often the focus and the spotlight has been on the boys. This is something Jason is aware of and has been trying to remedy, shifting his focus in recent years to the development of the girls team.
  
  

  I remember at the end-of-season party in my senior year, Jason handed out bricks that were painted green with silver writing that read “TANDEM XC.” He gave a brick to each of the girls and told us that we were the foundation. This literally heavy-handed metaphor made me laugh, but I also felt hopeful that we would grow. I still have my brick. Since then, the girls team has faced hurdles, growing and then falling in numbers again during the pandemic. Now, it’s on the rise with a strong group of runners, many of them sophomores and freshman, poised to flourish.
  
  

  Jason says, “We had six girls on the team last year and 18 boys, and that’s my big goal now; I want to build the girl’s program to the same level.”
  
  

  The cross country team faces a unique challenge as it seeks to hold both teams under one umbrella of coaches and resources. Still, Jason’s distinct style and approach help him to connect to all kinds of runners.

  A characteristic of Jason’s coaching style is the use of mantras to develop mental confidence. He drills the team with these repetitive phrases and metaphors. They’re often funny, but Jason explains that “running is 90 percent mental and the other 10 percent is in your head.”
  
  

  The value in these mantras he says, “is that there comes a point in every race or hard workout where you’re full of doubt. Doubt will creep in because you’re pushing your body to its maximum…you’re asking your body to do something right on the edge of what’s possible.”
  
  

  Oftentimes cramps, that pinch in the side, are neuromuscular. “Mantras are just ways to trick that neuromuscular pathway, by making the “pain cave” a happy place that you want to visit. It normalizes the suffering.” But pain is a tricky thing. It’s important to attend to, not hide from, because ignoring pain can lead to injury.
  
  

  The “pain-cave” is one of Jason’s most famous mantras. I remember him drawing it on the white board in the Field House. You journey into and through this painful place, but there is another side, something to be found by making it through. Noah Tinsley remembers, “I think Jason kind of portrayed it in a funny context, like ‘oh yeah they’re in the pain cave,’ but everyone knows it’s a very real thing. It wasn’t a thing to be avoided. It’s just gonna happen.”
  
  

  In the early days, the team made t-shirts that said “It’s Supposed to Hurt.” But Jason avoids some of that rhetoric now. “In the beginning,” he says, “it was a matter of distinguishing between jogging and racing. To actually race, it’s going to be painful, and you have to know that and prepare for it.”

  Here’s Noah again: “You can extrapolate that in a life way. You’re going to end up in other pain caves and that’s not a bad thing if you’re in the pain cave. It’s just good to say ‘I know that I’m here, and I know there’s something waiting for me if I go through this properly.’ I feel like the worst pain cave is if you just kind of avoid the pain.”
  
  

  The truth is, despite their strangeness, the mantras seem to work, and they become a part of the fabric and the language of the team. A key lesson from cross country for Noah, he says, was “the idea of separating your mind and your body, and being able to trust your body beyond what your mind thinks of it.”

• Who Is She But The One: Kate Bollinger ‘16

  4/21/2025
  Emma Johnson
  Who Is She But The One?

  Kate Bollinger ‘16

  

  
  
  Stories, Los Angeles–I’m sitting in a trendy combination bookstore and coffeehouse in L.A. when a girl walks by me. I notice her long blonde hair and cute shoes. Just as I’m having the thought, ‘those are cute boots,’ she turns on her heels and looks right at me, as if some magnet or wave pushed her in my direction. It’s Kate Bollinger. 

  
  

  We recognize each other and get to talking. I had reached out to Kate earlier in the summer hoping to find a time to interview her. I never expected we would bump into each other in a city on the other side of the country from Charlottesville. We talk about how alien L.A. feels. How different it is from Virginia and the East Coast. Yet, a chance meeting like this can make the world feel really small. 

  
  

  There must be some magical Tandem connection that carries across space and time. On an Antarctic cruise ship out at sea, two passengers, Dylan McAuley ‘14 and Ariel Shaker-Brown ‘07, discovered they both went to Tandem.

  
  

  You may remember Kate performing at open mics or Tandemonium. Since graduating from Tandem in 2016, she’s had incredible success as a musical artist. She currently has over two million monthly listeners on Spotify and has toured with artists like Faye Webster and Liz Phair. 

  In September, we spoke about her memories of Tandem and the evolution of her sound, just a few weeks before the release of her first album, Songs From A Thousand Frames of Mind.

  
  

  [This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]

  
  

  EJ: Growing up in a family of musicians, singing on your mom’s children’s albums and being exposed to lots of different kinds of music from your older brothers, it seems that your entry to music was quite natural and organic. Still, we all benefit from guidance and mentorship. You wrote your first song at 8 and your brother later gave you a songwriting notebook with a “guide to songwriting” written inside. Who have been some of your greatest teachers (you can think of “teacher” as broadly as you’d like)?

  
  

  KB: I was trying to think of who outside my family have been my greatest teachers. One of the earliest people who I would put on this list is this guy, Gene Ausborn. I went to Young Writers Workshop at Sweetbriar, I think when I was 14 or 15, and Gene was the songwriting teacher that year. He has a band called We Are Star Children.

  
  

  I remember he met with everybody individually, all of the young songwriters. He was so enthusiastic about what I was doing, and he was the first person to be like “You rock. You’re a rock star.” And I was like ‘what?!’ Cause I was a 14 year old girl, really insecure in some ways probably, and it was just really amazing to have somebody who I admired say that at that time. I feel like that gave me a lot of courage to keep doing and sharing what I was doing.

  
  

  After the camp was over…he emailed me and asked me to be first of three for a show that his band was playing. That was my first-ever show, and this kind of leads me into the next person who I consider to be a teacher of mine.

  
  

  I got asked to do this show, and the second band on the bill was the Extroadinaires. This guy Jay Purdy who was the front man of the Extroadinaires—they were a Charlottesville band, but then after high school I guess a lot of the guys in the band moved to Philly, and so I kind of consider them a Philly band even though they have Charlottesville ties. They were like my favorite band of all time growing up, because my oldest brother played violin on one of their albums, and so my dad and I got really into them and would listen to their CD in the car all the time. 

  
  

  And they just serendipitously were the second, they were the band opening for Gene’s band. So I got this email asking ‘will you open?’ and I was like ‘oh my god, this is my favorite band ever!’  These people are like famous superstars! So that was really exciting, and I met Jay from that show and he was really enthusiastic about my songs and said ‘you should come to Philly, and we’ll be your backing band and we’ll record an EP for you.’ Both of my brothers lived in Philly at the time. I don’t know, that’s a crazy thing to say, and I’m sure some people would say that and not really mean it, but he completely meant it. I went to Philly, and I stayed with my brother and recorded my first EP…At that point I was probably 16 or 17. And that was really exciting and crazy to me, and I think gave me some confidence at the time.

  
  

  And then, Jason (Farr) from Tandem. He’s one of my favorite teachers, like literal teachers, that I ever had. He was just really supportive. You know he was my history teacher, but he was really supportive of me in general and of my music.

  
  

  I guess the thing a lot of these people share is they gave me a lot of confidence to keep doing what I was doing and made me feel believed in. I was having an existential crisis my senior year, and I would go into [Jason’s] classroom and just cry and talk to him and he was super understanding. 

  
  

  And then, I had a professor, Lisa Spaar, who’s a poet at UVA. She is just amazing as a person and a poet, and when I was at UVA I was in the Poetry program and I felt like she was my mentor. She might have even been assigned as my mentor. Anyway, she was really encouraging, and then I had this realization while I was at UVA that it was hard to be in the Poetry program and take my music seriously, because writing poems every week for class and also trying to write songs sort of exhausted the same part of me. I felt like I couldn’t do both well enough at the same time. So I decided to leave the Poetry program and switch to Cinematography, which is what I studied, and she was really supportive of that even though she was my poetry professor. That meant a lot to me.

  
  

  The last person that I wrote down is Matt White, my friend from Richmond. I met him during the Pandemic when I was living in Richmond, and we just became really fast friends and started writing songs together, like every week or every few weeks. We would just get together and talk for 2 or 3 hours and then write a song. And a lot of the stuff I was going through at that time reminded him of what he had been going through 10 years before, especially stuff with the music industry and band dynamics, and just a lot of things that I had never been exposed to up until that point and was having a lot of trouble with. He just became a really good friend.

  
  

  Anytime anything happens with music, or the industry, or whatever, that I’m confused about or feel upset about, I pretty much text or call him immediately.

  
  

  EJ: It’s curious to me, too, about the poetry…It makes sense that it would drain from the same kind of source but I wonder, did you ever think about, were your poems also songs? Could they work in both ways, or were they sort of separate in your mind?

  
  

  KB: I think I can do that a little bit more now. Sometimes I’ll write something and I’ll work it into a song, but at the time it was completely separate, but sort of using the same muscle. But I couldn’t take a poem and be like ‘oh, this works as a song, too.’

  
  

  EJ: You’ve described what you create as an amalgamation of your influences. Being given Tragic Kingdom and the Lizzie Mcguire soundtrack as CDs for Christmas captures that pretty perfectly. There was always this melding of genres and also melding of experiences: the pop enthusiasm of girlhood with an infusion of “cool.” Who are your current inspirations? 

  
  

  KB: I’ve been getting back into a lot of the Elephant 6 bands like Of Montreal, the Apples in Stereo, Neutral Milk Hotel, a  lot of those ‘90s bands both on a musical level and the visual style that a lot of them had at the time. 

  
  

  They have a sort of ‘60s-inspired feel but done in this ‘90s way that I really like, and then they also had a lot of attention to detail with every part of the project which I really appreciate, every piece of the record feels homemade kind of. So, I love those bands.

  
  

  I’ve been getting into Laura Nyro in the last year, and I love her. And then R. Stevie Moore, I’ve been really into and he’s the–I think people call him “the godfather of home recording”-and that’s made me want to get back into recording myself.

  
  

  EJ: Something that’s really appealing about you as an artist is your clear and attentive aesthetic. You have a recognizable visual identity, but your style also evolves and changes as you do. As well as being a musician, you are also clearly a very visual artist, and it makes sense that you’ve described conceiving of songs as visual ideas in your head. 

  
  

  In your recent work, I’m particularly struck by the use of color. The colors convey so much emotion and also help to tell the story. I’m noticing lots of bright, primary colors that evoke a dreamy ‘60s ambiance (à la Les Demoiselles de Rochefort), but that also feel deeply connected to childhood. 

  
  

  A childlike approach to creativity comes through in your music videos as well. It’s reminiscent of growing up in the digital age when so much of play is tied up in video, making silly videos with friends, a creative process without guilt, doubt, hesitation. The characters in your music videos are these archetypal heroes and villains. There’s lots of crime and violence, but then they also seem to come straight out of fairy tales and children’s books. What were the music videos you loved most as a kid? Whose videos do you love today?

  
  

  KB: Well, this just popped into my head, I think for the videos more recent influences of mine haven’t been other music videos. For example, this video that I’m working on now, or that I’m starting to work on, the idea is, I know I want it to be sort of like a ‘60s girls marching band kind of feel, and so I’ve been listening to the song and watching found footage on Youtube of marching bands. So that’s been something that’s helpful to me. Rather than watching other music videos, usually I’ll just find the thing that I’m influenced by, and then I’ll mute the video and watch it with the song and that leads to other ideas.

  
  

  I think pretty much anything can be a good music video. I remember I was at this bar on tour and there was like some nature documentary playing, but then there was music in the bar and I was like this is amazing together. I like videos that are also edited like a short film that has music behind it, not edited totally like a music video.

  
  

  Then, with the childlike thing... Of course, a lot of great art is disturbing on some level or makes you think about things in some new way, but the art that I like the most–going back to the Elephant 6 thing–a lot of that art feels like art from children’s books. It feels very comforting to look at and it’s inspiring…I feel like a lot of people think that art needs to be this disturbing thing, but I like art that makes you feel a sense of comfort. Or, at least personally, that’s kind of what I want the stuff that I make to be like.

  
  

  As a kid I loved Gwen Stefani, and she has a lot of cool music videos. There’s one, I forget if it’s Gwen Stefani or No Doubt, but the song is “It’s My Life,” and she’s like killing all of these men, and it’s violent—like you said something about how some of my videos are violent—but it’s done in this sort of silly way, and it makes it fun and funny. So I think maybe that video is what put the idea in my head. 

  
  

  EJ: What brought you to Tandem? Tell me about your Tandem experience. Do any stories or memories come to mind? 

  
  

  KB: I transferred to Tandem part way through my 10th grade year. I just was so bored and uninspired at Monticello, and I was walking across the street every day to Tandem, after school to hang out with Phoebe (Schuyler '16) cause she and I became friends in middle school and were really close friends. And so my mom would pick me up every day from Tandem pretty much anyway, and then Ali (Abdel-Rahman '16), who I was friends with from Monticello, had transferred a year before me, he was like “why don’t you just go here? Like you should just go here” and I was like “yeah, yeah I should.” So I applied and I got in, and we were waiting to hear about financial aid and we got it, and I remember my mom texted me while I was at school and was like “we got it! You can go to Tandem!” I was so excited and I told all my friends at Monticello that I was transferring to Tandem so that I could ‘focus on my music’ which is so funny cause, I mean, maybe I thought that was true, but I don’t know, that seems like a really serious thing to say for a high schooler, I guess.

  
  

  So I started going to Tandem. I still think of 10th grade as one of the best years of my life. It was so fun and exciting and I loved everyone, all the kids and the teachers. Some of the memories that stick out the most to me are like Spring Day obviously was so awesome to me. 

  
  

  There was one day, I think this was senior year or maybe junior year, where some of the teachers gave Phoebe and Carson and maybe Eli or somebody else, some money to go down the street to buy a new couch for the senior lounge from Goodwill. So we took Pheobe’s dad’s truck and drove to Goodwill and bought this couch that had a pull-out bed, and we brought it back, and it was a secret that it was a pull-out bed. The next day we pulled out the bed and we were all piled on the bed and a teacher came in and they were like, “mm mm no, that’s not gonna work.” 

  
  

  My memories from Tandem are a lot of antics, just like getting up to a lot of really ridiculous, fun stuff. That doesn’t sound like it would be really important, but it was just such a fun and inspiring part of my life, and it was important that there was sort of like this absurdity. There were so many things that were kind of ridiculous about it and it’s cool talking to you because I feel like it’s hard to explain Tandem to people who didn’t go there.

  
  

  There was Nura—oh my god, I haven’t said her name in so long it feels wrong kind of—she had a poetry class one year that I took. Do you remember her office upstairs in the main building? It was like in there and it just, I don’t know how to describe it but I have this really strong feeling associated with Tandem that’s kind of hard to describe. 

  
  

  

  Kate performing for Tandemonium at Cville Coffee in 2014

  
  

  EJ: I have this very clear image of you in my mind from when I was in 8th or 9th grade. You’re sitting on stage bent over your guitar wearing big Doc Martins and singing softly and angelically. My friends and I were totally enamored with you. We found your music on SoundCloud and thought you were the coolest person to ever exist. Aside from your talent, you seemed to have a real sense of yourself and your voice, and a courage to share that without fear. I wonder if we were some of your earliest, secret fans. What’s your relationship like to your fans today? Do you have a listener in mind when you’re creating?

  
  

  KB: That’s so nice. It’s funny seeing that because I’ve had that experience and had that experience a lot when I was younger. Older girls are like the coolest thing that could ever exist when you’re a young girl. You don’t think that other people are having that experience, too, when you’re older than them.

  
  

  It is funny to remember that there are people I don’t know who are listening and hearing the songs. It’s kind of easy for me to forget about that sometimes, and that makes it easier for me to just share things without feeling self-conscious about it. But I think it can also at times make what I’m doing feel really self-centered because I have no way of seeing if my music is having an impact on anyone. So I don’t know, I guess it’s kind of a good thing and a bad thing that I don’t really see the response. It’s weird with social media. It can feel like when you’re releasing something that nothing is happening in real life. 

  
  

  I got a P.O. box and I’m making this songbook zine thing. I’m working with a designer right now to finish the book and then we’re gonna get it printed. And there’s a song on the album called “Postcard from a Cloud,” and in that chapter I’m gonna have my P.O. box and tell people that they can send me letters if they want to. And that to me feels like I really want to be connected to people, but I want it to be in a more tangible way than just a DM or something, so I’m gonna try to do that and see how it goes.

  
  

  EJ: That’s a great idea. I love that. Do you feel it when you’re touring or performing, that connection?

  
  

  KB: Definitely, like some people will talk to me when I’m at the merch table and that’s really nice. It is kind of like I go the whole year without knowing—seeing numbers and knowing that people are listening—but not knowing who they are, so it’s nice to talk to people.

  
  

  It is weird cause the more people who are listening online, I don’t really feel–like nothing is different with me—you know what I mean? So it’s weird.

  
  

  EJ: Returning to those early Sound Cloud tracks, like “Wolves,” “etch a sketch,” and “magnet poems,” I was struck by how your vocal style has changed over the past decade. On those songs, your voice is still light and ethereal, but it has this kind of lispy lilt to it that feels very of that moment in time, mid-2010s twee. “Wolves” is the song I most remember loving and listening to over and over again. (There must’ve been something about wolf songs going around then, or I was just really into them, Phosphorescent, Blitzen Trapper). 

  
  

  The mood of those early songs is also really different from your stuff in the past 5 years, more sad and wistful, not as peppy or upbeat. Clearly some of that is about the passage of time, culture has shifted and you’ve grown up. But instrumentation also seems to play an important role. When it’s just you, your voice and a guitar there’s more space and it becomes more austere and melancholic, as opposed to full and atmospheric when there’s a band backing you or a lot of production. I noticed a similar contrast between the live vs. recorded versions of “Lady in the Darkest Hour” and how different the mood feels in those performances. 

  
  

  How do you think about the contrast in sound between the solo artist and the frontman, the voice more as instrument that blends with others rather than center stage? After doing some solo touring and authoring tracks like “Running” (and now “Lonely” and “Sweet Devil”) where your voice is much more in the foreground, are you considering a shift back or in a new direction? 

  
  

  KB: When I was in high school, I was just recording stuff on Garage Band and making those really kind of simple recordings and uploading them to Soundcloud and Band Camp, and then I met this guy John at UVA who was recording other local artists and bands, and he started recording me. We made this EP, this like two-song thing. I think that was the first song that I ever put on Spotify. And from there, he and I were just making tons of stuff together, and I was releasing it under my name. In retrospect, I’m like that was a band pretty much, or not a band, it was like a duo project because we were writing a lot of stuff together. 

  
  

  I feel like I tried everything over the last 5 years, and now I’m kind of starting to figure out what feels, what is natural to me, I guess. The stuff that I’m writing now, obviously it doesn’t have the same moodiness, cause I was a teenager. But the stuff that I’m making now feels in some ways like my early stuff–just guitar, vocals, and I’m recording on Garage Band again. 

  
  

  At some point I want to not work with a producer. I just want to work with an engineer or try to record myself and just put out some more sort of primitive recordings. Some of the songs on the record that are like that, “Lonely” for example, feel a little bit more true to me or something with the minimal production.

  
  

  EJ: After graduating from Tandem, you went to UVA and kept developing your music on the side. How did you make the transition from being a college student with a passion for music that was separate from career aspirations into a musician in full force? 

  
  

  In “Yards/Gardens” you describe a fear of being left behind and contrast your experience with that of your peers and friends who have taken a more traditional journey and now have “occupations” and “yards.” 

  
  

  What’s so compelling to me about you as an artist and what’s been so inspiring watching you grow is your perseverance and steadiness. You just keep going, keep making, don’t seem to stall or lose your way. Since committing to this path, have there been moments of doubt? 

  
  

  KB: Obviously, I am constantly working on stuff, but I do feel like with a lot of the Spotify stuff there’s a certain amount of luck and timing involved. I started releasing songs on Spotify, and then the stuff that I was making with John that was a little bit more like pop and beat driven, that music started to have more traction on the internet than my singer-songwriter material and it started to take off a little bit more. 

  
  

  I think in 2019, I got an email from these managers, these guys Eric and Tony, and we started talking over the internet. They were based in L.A., and they started managing me and then over the next few years we kind of assembled a team of people together, and, eventually, a couple years ago, got a record deal when I was living in Richmond. 

  
  

  Having a label definitely made the transition a lot easier just from a funding perspective. There was less of a dire need to find an adult job or something. And that sort of gave me this confidence that I could be doing music. But I definitely had a lot of doubts at times. Now, I feel like I’m falling in love with making music again and I’m doing it on my own, like I’m just recording on Garage Band and it’s been so fun. But for years I was feeling really bogged down by the music industry side of things and the business stuff. All the stuff that’s not really actually related to songwriting or music at all. 

  
  

  And then also I’ve had doubts because I’m also so much more of a songwriter than a performer. I like writing songs and I really like working on projects, and I like making this book and conceptualizing music videos, and assembling a group of people that I know to do different things for the video, and shooting the video, and editing. I love doing all of that stuff, but I don’t like some of what comes with being a public-facing musician. So, I don’t know. 

  
  

  But at the same time I haven’t felt enough doubt—I feel like the music industry is so, kind of, unpredictable. I was listening to this one interview with Liz Phair, and I think Snail Mail. And Liz was saying with touring if you’re getting opportunities to tour, you just have to do them because your music career is like a huge truck and when it stops going it’s really hard to get it to start again. So I’ve kind of had that in the back of my mind when I’ve had doubts, like at some point I’m not even gonna have the option to be like “maybe I’m not going to do this.” I just need to keep going with it and figure out what I want kind of along the way.

  
  

  I will say, that’s what I love doing, and I feel so lucky and grateful that that’s what I get to do so I wouldn’t want to paint the wrong picture about it. I feel so grateful to be doing this.

  
  

  EJ: What’s been different about approaching the album project as opposed to the EP? What I notice is the very conscious aesthetic and creative package. It feels like we’re going to receive something that has been put together with care and that all the pieces come together in a thoughtful way. 

  
  

  KB: In high school I would make a song and I would upload it to the internet immediately with like no time in between. And I kind of continued to do that, after I met John; we would make something and I would just put it out immediately, kind of without giving it a second thought. 

  
  

  With the album, it took longer to make and so I’ve had to sit on things. I’ve had to make decisions I guess, more intentionally, and so it feels like something that I’ll like for a longer period of time because of that. I think the whole process has felt more intentional, and it feels like a more realized thing than some of my previous stuff which feels a little bit more stream of consciousness. 

  
  

  I wrote this recently for another interview that I was writing answers to, and I think it’s true: the album feels like it represents a longer period of my life, whereas the previous things I put out, like the singles and the EPs, feel like tiny moments in my life.

  
  

  I am really happy with how it turned out, and I think it is the kind of album I wanted to make.  My idea going into it was that it would kind of feel like a mixtape, like a mixtape you would make for your friend, or like a playlist now, lots of different genres, and styles, and eras, and whatever. That was sort of what I wanted to do, and I feel like it’s turned out that way.

  
  

  EJ: What does Tandem mean to you today?

  
  

  KB: I mean it feels like a core part of who I am, definitely. 

  
  

  Some people, I feel like they can remember full scenes in their head, and I’m not that way at all. It’s like a kind of foggy image and then a feeling. A lot of my memories of Tandem are kind of that way. I’m like looking at an image with a veil over it or something but it feels–it’s like this whimsical dream in my memory. It was so special and I’m such a nostalgic person, so I feel really sentimental about it.

  
  
  
  
  

  After the release of her debut album, Songs From A Thousand Frames of Mind, in late September, Kate headed out on tour with her band. One of her early venues was in Charlottesville. 

  
  

  The Southern, Charlottesville—The show is crawling with Tandemites. Kate looks out at the crowd on stage and muses that this feels like a high school, college, and family reunion rolled into one. I’m standing near the back next to a group of older women who seem to be having a blast. At one point, Kate has to restart a song, because she could hear her mom’s voice and it threw her off. Watching Kate now, hearing her again live, I remember the feeling of watching her years before, the tender, sweetness of her voice that sends out this sense of comfort and warmth. 

  
  

  

  
  

  But I also see for the first time, I think I see her clearer now, without the haze of young girl mania and fascination. I see her discomfort being on stage, performing. I see the Kate who would rather be writing songs and making art with her friends. The Kate who is holding on and trying to figure out what she wants along the way. 

  
  

  Still, being in this room full of love and community, I’m grateful to her for bringing us together in this way. Her voice brought us to this room, to find one another again, to dance, to be moved, to remember.